The present invention relates generally to data formatting and communications, and more particularly to a system and method for dynamically mapping and formatting information for presentation on a computer display device.
The ever-increasing capabilities of computer networks and the internet has brought an increasing demand for information accessibility. Not only do people use desktop computers to access networked data information, various communication devices also provide a capability for displaying large volumes of information. It is increasingly important now for a user of modern communication devices to be able to access various information available on a company-wide intranet, the internet and/or other networked communication infrastructure. Usually information providers store and supply the information while numerous users access the information using many different types of display devices, such as desktop computers, laptop computers, cell phones, personal digital assistant (PDAs), etc. However, many types of display devices are of different shapes and sizes, especially those for mobile devices, and often accept the information in different formats.
It is a common practice to store a document or an application (collectively "document") on a server computer. The document may also include a defined page orientation for appropriately transmitting and mapping the stored information to an individual display device. With the proliferation of available display devices on the market, more limitations are inevitably imposed on the display devices with respect to their display characteristics. This proliferation has caused a number of problems in displaying a single document on a wide array of display devices, especially with regards to page orientation.
One problem for efficiently displaying information on a display device is "conforming" the document, i.e., arranging the information in a predetermined format to be used by the display device. This is also referred to as a conformal problem. Taking the popular internet data communication structure as an example, when a user accesses an individual web page document, the document is transmitted as a file to the user's display device. If the web page document was not designed by the original programmer/designer to be in an appropriate format and size as supported by the receiving display device, then the accessed web page may become difficult, if not impossible, to read.
Although a typical desktop computer web browser is able to display almost any web page document of various dimensions and/or complexity, various mobile communication devices (e.g. cell phones or pagers) may have very limited display space. Furthermore, some communication devices do not have a web browser available. Further still, in some cases, the display is limited to only a couple of lines. In these situations, it is almost impossible to maintain the original page orientation because the page as designed simply can not fit in the small display. If the original page orientation is removed from the document, or not defined at all, then the document can not properly conform to the display device.
Referring to FIG. 1, an internet based data communication network 10 is shown to illustrate the conformal display problem. In this example, a document including individual web pages 102a-102n is stored in an application server 104. The application server 104 is connected to a database (DB) 106 and an e-commerce server 108 for formatting the web pages and transmitting them to a web server. It is understood that the servers 104, 108 and DB 106 may actually represent one or more different servers that may contain one or more separate databases on an as-needed base. Moreover, any one document may contain a series of displayable files such as the web pages.
The web pages 102a-102n are to be transmitted to a web server 110, and then transmitted via hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) to different receiving display devices 112, 114 and 116. Display devices 112, 114, and 116 have different sized "display views" 118, 120, and 122, respectively. A display view defines the display area on a display device, and is described in display parameters such as the number of characters, the number of character rows, the number of character columns, font and image capability, and so forth. For example, computer 112 is a typical desktop using a web browser and Display View 118 is capable to display web pages in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format. Computer 114 is a cell phone and Display View 120 has a comparatively small viewing area. The web pages created for Display View 118 may not be used on the Display 120 because of specific display limitations.
In order to display the web pages 102a-102n in a useful and practical way, they are separately recreated and/or reformatted. In addition, the web pages would have to be rewritten in a language compatible with the display device, e.g., a mark up language that the display device 114 can accept. It is understood that languages such as Wireless Markup Language (WML) and Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML) are typical for wireless communication display devices, but are significantly different from languages such as HTML which is used for the display device 112.
One of the reason that the WML and HDML were created is because the wireless communication display devices can not handle many display objects, such as pictures, multimedia objects, and so forth. Similarly, for a personal digital assistant (PDA) 116 which has a browser that can display information in languages other than the HTML, the web pages 102a-102n on the application server 104 are required to be reformatted by a web page designer/programmer to fit for Display View 122.
With the above described communication structure in place, the availability of a single document to be used by various display devices requires that the document be recreated in different formats. A designer/programmer usually has to create, at the document level, a document for each expected display device format. As the numbers and types display devices increase, and as the documents become more complex, the conformal problem becomes more troublesome.
For example, three different models of cell phones may have three different display views. One model may have a text interface of four display lines with twelve characters on a line; another model may have a text interface of twelve display lines with sixteen characters on a line, and the third model may be able to cope with images and may have a graphical interface. Traditionally, a separate document must be created for each model of the cell phone. Not only does this require extra time to create the documents, the created documents may clog the application server. Moreover, maintaining these different versions of the original document are excessively burdensome.
Therefore, problems caused by the conventional model in creating multiple documents for different display devices inevitably impose an unnecessary cost on the development and maintenance effort. Moreover, the designer/programmer has to anticipate what new display devices or new versions of the existing display device are going to be used in the future and what their capabilities will be so that the designer can constantly create new documents.
Another problem for efficiently displaying information on a display device is "localizing" the document, i.e., interpreting the information in a predetermined style for the user the display device. For example, a web page document may be created in one part of the world (e.g., France) and received in another (e.g., the U.S.). The user receiving the document may prefer the document be in a specific language (e.g., English). The display device may also be programmed to indicate a preferred language that the user can understand. However, in the conventional model, in order to present the document in different languages, a copy of the document must be created in each specific language. Similar to the detrimental consequences of the conformal problem, additional development and maintenance problems are induced for creating and managing web pages in different languages.
A method is thus needed for effectively and efficiently creating and maintaining a document/application for a wide array of display devices with varying display characteristics to meet the needs of different users of the display devices.